De Barrio
“We must learn to judge a society by its noises, by its art and by its festivals more than by its statistics” (Jacques Attali).
This multichannel installation recreates the sonic reality of a working-class neighbourhood in Madrid through recordings of its surroundings and the voices of its inhabitants. Conceived as an immersive and interactive experience, the act of listening is modified by the visitor’s movements in space, so that their own presence conditions the perception and unfolding of the soundscape.
In our time, noise is marked by excess: an overabundance of stimuli, messages and repetitions that saturate listening and shape our relationship with the environment. We move through increasingly dense, mediated and controlled soundscapes, where individual voices merge, become distorted and often grow difficult to distinguish. To speak of noise is, in this sense, also to speak of ourselves: of what we listen to, what we ignore and the ways in which we inhabit a shared context.
The installation proposes isolating certain sounds within that noisy mass in order to make them perceptible, inviting the listener to immerse themselves in a sonic reality with which they may or may not identify, but whose traces remain recognisable. To construct it, it was essential to incorporate not only the soundscape of the neighbourhood, but also the responses, testimonies and resonances of those who inhabit it. The visitor can experience how their movements interact with the acoustic space, making them even more involved in —and complicit with— that noise. Listening, attending and trying to understand become part of the same gesture, even if that understanding does not necessarily lead to certainty.
